Even more than working in the infirmary, Emily loved to bake bread. At any given moment, two massive cooking operations were underway at the Homestead: cooking the next meal and baking bread.
As the closest thing to money these days, fresh-baked bread had become currency between the Homestead and the world. Whenever any salvage was needed from the valley, they’d slap the notice on a dry erase board at the tent city below the barricades, list a value of the item in loaves of bread, and pretty soon somebody would show up with that item. Mattresses, water filters, grass seed, Romex wire. Anything that hadn’t been eaten or burned down in the valley could be had for a few loaves of bread. Jeff Kirkham paid new recruits in fresh loaves, feeding their families in exchange for providing security. Every day, the four Pioneer Princess wood-burning stoves of the Homestead pumped out loaf after loaf of bread, feeding scores of families. The Homestead forest contained hundreds of cords of dried wood, since it was located far up the mountain, nested in the oak and maple forests. The stoves could run for years on the dried wood provided by Mother Nature within a short walk of the cook stoves. A troop of ladies and children went out every day with chainsaws and axes and brought back a half-cord of wood, feeding the roaring maws of the Pioneer Princesses.
Emily’s favorite job was kneading the dough. Her forearms burned after kneading for fifteen minutes, but it was good work, honest work. She could picture the yeast bubbling inside the dough, bulking up the loaves, filling them with an earthy aroma. Maybe none of that mystique mattered to the families surviving on this bread; maybe calories were calories to them. But Emily liked to think it mattered. Maybe she was doing something to alleviate suffering after all.
Down the hill, near the bottom of Vista View Boulevard, a small park had been set aside for the families of the “hired guns.” That had been the unfortunate name given to the defense force hired by Jeff Kirkham. A work crew had thrown together the shanty town in Vista Park, complete with a fresh water tank.
Burke Ross, Emily’s granddad, had located and bought six surplus FEMA-made, solar-powered poop processing plants. Somehow, these big fiberglass vats took a bit of solar power, tons of poo, and turned it all into fertilizer soup. The shanty town had been loaned two of the solar poop processing plants.
The fifty families in the shanty town had mashed all the grass around their tents into a muddy hard pack but, otherwise, the tent town was clean and disease-free. They even had a garden going behind the poo-processing plant, watered by the “compost tea” coming out the back of the poop pods. Emily wasn’t sure she would eat that lettuce, but her grandpa assured her the compost tea was “clean as a whistle.”
Around the shanty town, Emily watched the children play in the playground and the women laugh around the park benches, cobbling together whatever they could for a meal in addition to their daily bread.
Life goes on, she realized. People love and laugh and make stew out of weeds.
At least here, behind a wall of guns, people had a chance at a life worth living. Maybe someday, if they all did their jobs and kept hope alive, the pall of doom would roll back across the valley and people would live without fear once again.
“A month ago, I’d never feed my kids this carbohydrate crap,” Jacquelyn complained to Jenna Ross as they ladled soup and handed out bread to the long line.
Protein and fats were scarce during the collapse, even with the Homestead’s outstanding food storage. Feeding two hundred members, and another hundred and fifty families in the shanty town, required a remarkable amount of food. Even at an average of fifteen hundred calories a day per person, that meant half-a-million calories per day.
One pound of wheat flour came in at about fifteen hundred calories, which meant that wheat carbohydrates went further than anything else, consuming four hundred pounds of wheat per day. At that rate, they would run out of wheat within a year.
All food isn’t necessarily good food, Jacquelyn and Jenna knew. Carbohydrates provided bulk calories, but they were arguably the worst kind of calories, giving energy but little else. Fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, dairy and lean meats would be critical for long-term survival. Carbs wouldn’t do much more than keep people from starving.
Carbs were mostly what they had. It was the Gordian Knot of food storage. Carbs kept well. Proteins and fat went bad fast. Wheat, rice, sugar and other carbohydrates would keep in an oxygen-free bucket for thirty years or more. Vegetable oils wouldn’t keep past a year, with virgin olive oil lasting just two years. Animal fats went bad within a week or less. Fresh fruits and veggies, even in cold storage, would struggle to keep over a winter.
The Homestead had freeze-dried food, too—where proteins and fats could be better preserved—but freeze-dried food for two hundred people would have cost millions, and it would have had to be rotated out every thirty years, same as dried food.
The realities of growing fresh food presented a vexing set of problems. The Homestead had seven glass greenhouses, two three-thousand-square-foot grow houses, and kept over a hundred livestock: dozens of chickens, four fish ponds and a hundred rabbits. Even so, those resources required careful shepherding—not killing any animals required for future breeding. And the greenhouses needed two months to spin up production, assuming perfect fortune from the gods of agriculture. Even at full tilt, the livestock and grow operations of the Homestead could produce only about a quarter of the caloric needs of the group, which left them eating mostly dried carbohydrates.
Any way they sliced it, the people of the Homestead would experience a seventy-five percent reduction in fats and proteins from their pre-collapse diets. Compared to early American Indians, that would still be a big step up in the quality of the menu. Compared to pre-collapse society, it was a woefully unappetizing proposition.
Just ten days after the collapse of the stock market, folks at the Homestead were already sick to death of the food. Flavorful food had vanished like a hooker after church. Without meat, butter, cheese, cream, and fresh vegetables, the cooks could only do so much with salt and spices to make the food interesting.
Fresh meat required waiting for breed stock to get breeding. Dairy required waiting for the female goats and cows to give birth. Fresh vegetables required waiting for the greenhouses to kick in. Ramp-up time would take as long as six months, especially to get dairy running. It required breeding cows, dropping calves, and then continuing to milk them to maintain lactation. Since Homestead farmers didn’t have time to milk dozens of cows prior to the sudden collapse, most of the cows were dry when the shit hit the fan.
The Homestead food crew had to rack their brains to come up with acceptable food options. Every day they burned deeper into their store of freeze-dried and every day they listened to good-natured complaints from the folks in the food line. It would be a losing battle until the greenhouses kicked in and the animals got knocked up and, even then, they would eventually run out of wheat.
“You’re doing a crappy job with the politics around here,” Jeff complained to Jason Ross as evening descended on the Homestead.
The two leaders of the Homestead stood on the colonnade looking over the neighborhood. From where they stood, they could see Tim Masterson on his front lawn, a quarter mile down the hill, leading fifteen men in combat drills. To Jeff, it looked like blind porcupines having sex.